Village Number Four We Anxiously Looked For; Village
Number Four We Never Saw; For Round Us Came The Dark, Seeming
To
come out on to the river from the forests and the side ravines,
where for some hours we had
Seen it sleeping, like a sailor with his
clothes on in bad weather. On we paddled, looking for signs of
village fires, and seeing them not. The Erd-geist knew we wanted
something, and seeing how we personally lacked it, thought it was
beauty; and being in a kindly mood, gave it us, sending the lovely
lingering flushes of his afterglow across the sky, which, dying,
left it that divine deep purple velvet which no one has dared to
paint. Out in it came the great stars blazing high above us, and
the dark round us was be-gemmed with fire-flies: but we were not as
satisfied with these things as we should have been; what we wanted
were fires to cook by and dry ourselves by, and all that sort of
thing. The Erd-geist did not understand, and so left us when the
afterglow had died away, with only enough starlight to see the
flying foam of the rapids ahead and around us, and not enough to see
the great trees that had fallen from the bank into the water.
These, when the rapids were not too noisy, we could listen for,
because the black current rushes through their branches with an
impatient "lish, swish"; but when there was a rapid roaring close
alongside we ran into those trees, and got ourselves mauled, and had
ticklish times getting on our course again.
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